LibreOffice gaining momentum, heading to Android, iOS, and the Web

French government agencies have announced plans to adopt LibreOffice on half a …

LibreOffice, a community-driven fork of OpenOffice.org that was founded last year, is gaining considerable momentum. An announcement made this week at a LibreOffice conference in Paris revealed that a number of French government agencies plan to adopt the open source office suite.

The LibreOffice development community is also working on a number of ports, with the aim of bringing the software to mobile platforms and making it accessible through Web browsers. These efforts could help further expand the LibreOffice audience.

The French government's deployment of LibreOffice will include half a million Windows computers. According to a LibreOffice representative who informed us about the news, that deployment represents a five percent increase in the software's user base on the Windows operating system. LibreOffice is currently believed to have 25 million users worldwide.

The administrative authority of Île-de-France (a region that consists largely of Paris) has officially joined the advisory board of The Document Foundation (TDF), the independent governance body behind the LibreOffice project. They plan to distribute 800,000 USB keys with LibreOffice and other open source software applications to students in the region. The move could help to improve LibreOffice's mainstream visibility.

In addition to these major announcements, the developers behind LibreOffice have also revealed plans to deliver mobile ports of the office suite. Android and iOS versions of LibreOffice are under development and are expected to arrive late in 2012 or early in 2013. The initial porting effort will focus on the tablet form factor, but phone versions could be developed later.

The mobile ports are based on the efforts of Tor Lillqvist. He discussed the challenges of cross-compiling LibreOffice for other platforms in a blog post earlier this year. The strategy he lays out is to port underlying implementation code, but create platform-specific user interfaces. He has already successfully demonstrated that it is possible to compile LibreOffice code for iOS in Xcode.

Another impressive project that the LibreOffice development community is undertaking to expand the availability of the office suite is LibreOffice Online, which allows users to run the office suite in a Web browser through the Canvas element. It uses Broadway, an HTML5 backend for the Gtk+ development toolkit. Because it depends on WebSocket and the Canvas element, it doesn't work in all mainstream browsers yet. Michael Meeks, the Novell developer who is prototyping LibreOffice Online, has published a compelling demonstration.

LibreOffice and TDF were originally founded in September, 2010 by former OpenOffice.org (OOo) developers. The fork was partly a response to concerns about Oracle's community-hostile stewardship of OOo and a number of long-standing procedural and governance problems that existed even before Oracle's acquisition of Sun. LibreOffice celebrated its first anniversary last month.

Really happy to see this gaining some momentum. The timing is right and its a nice piece of software. Interesting to see governments introducing open source products as austerity measures, sign of the times and all that jazz.

So what happens when they decide to shelve the project? If I was a Government agency I would want assurances that support would be there for it. Updates, compatibility. I just see government's looking at the price tag and not really researching the rest. This is not taking issue directly with LibreOffice. But rather with any alternative software.

Uhhh... Considering how enormously slow and big it is on the desktop, I have trouble believing it'd be useable on a mobile device unless they REALLY shave a lot of the crud off!

Slow is a subjective term and I won't respond to it much. I have Libre Office and Office installed on my computer and Libre is the faster one to me. It takes an entirety for Office to get off the splash screen

Libre office is 120mb which is WAY smaller than MS office and I'm sure they port it to a mobile platform they could trim the size since a lot of the stuff on the desktop wouldn't be needed on mobile.

So what happens when they decide to shelve the project? If I was a Government agency I would want assurances that support would be there for it. Updates, compatibility. I just see government's looking at the price tag and not really researching the rest. This is not taking issue directly with LibreOffice. But rather with any alternative software.

You mean the Gov decides to shelve it or the LO community?

The former is much more likely than the latter. LO is a community with a number of commercial backers.

As we saw with Sun/OOo and Nokia it's more risky to go with software from a single corporate backer - they can decide to drop it on a whim or change of management or buy out.

At least with Libre Office you can pay Red Hat or Novell or any number of reputable firms to support your deployment. The chance of them all going away is much smaller.

I agree w/ saturblackhole. MSOffice 2010 comes on a DVD now - i think it's about 2gb. even office 2003 was something like 350MB.

A mobile version would likely only come with word processor and spreadsheet, and MAYBE a presentation viewer. and by the time it gets released (late 2012?) most smartphones ought to have at least a gig of storage if not more. my droid2 already has a gig. the current "office" offerings, which leave a lot to be desired, are already 25+ megs. I wouldn't mind a 50+ meg installer if it was actually worth a damn. i think fonts would be one of the biggest things to have.

Uhhh... Considering how enormously slow and big it is on the desktop, I have trouble believing it'd be useable on a mobile device unless they REALLY shave a lot of the crud off!

Have you used LibreOffice, or just OpenOffice? LO is pretty snappy on my modest-even-by-2008-standards desktop. I'm not even using the "helper" thing that runs in the background. Having both Calc and Writer open uses about 44MB of RAM, while having one WIndows Explorer window open is taking up 32MB. Don't know if that's considered "slow and big," though.

The Republican Party officially condemns this socialist, French 'LibreOffice' and will now only refer to it as 'Freedom Office'. Additionally, only Microsoft Office will be approved for writing memos in Congress, because Microsoft Office produces jobs and profits for millionaires and 'Freedom Office' is a jobs-killing socialist project that undermines the unfettered freedom of the rich to create jobs for pool boys and bodyguards and Lamborghini salesmen. Liberals want you to use this 'Freedom Office' so that they can give government money to homeless crackheads that are shooting up our schools and shoplifting from selfless small business Christian saints. Vote Perry/Cain 2012!

Given what a poor and inept job they've done of the Mac OS X client over the years, I can't say I have much hope in their adapting to an iOS or even Android interface well. They seem to know two things - Linux and Windows, full stop.

Have you used LibreOffice, or just OpenOffice? LO is pretty snappy on my modest-even-by-2008-standards desktop.

Yep, and on Mac OS X it's no better - still a large, slow, *ugly* piece of software. I'm aware of how different it is on Windows and Linux, but to me this speaks poorly to their ability to port LO to another platform and meet the quality levels expected.

This is great news for those folks who don't need to pay for a Professional Suite and just need to edit a document now and then. I prefer Apple's model though with iWork, with multiple allowed installs and one price per app, but I prefer Word

Yep, and on Mac OS X it's no better - still a large, slow, *ugly* piece of software. I'm aware of how different it is on Windows and Linux, but to me this speaks poorly to their ability to port LO to another platform and meet the quality levels expected.

Well considering "they" is a bunch of volunteers and Linux distros I'm not surprised.

If you are willing to pay for overpriced, locked-down hardware, surely you can pay for Office software and don't give a crap about software freedom? So Apple users are probably not much of target market for LO.

I will going to use it when the project drops gtk and java. QT should be a good start

Actually, LibreOffice does not use GTK - it uses some custom GUI toolkit, though it has quite a few problems - items flicker when putting the mouse over them, menus are recognized as menus by the operating system and Compiz doesn't animate them, detachable toolbars have weird dragging problems, etc.

Also, LibreOffice is almost completely written in C/C++. I am not sure, but I think that Java is only used for plugins/extensions and for database connections.

Mac support is really in need of some work. Having just bought my first Mac, I am waiting for the next release of iWork to make the switch ASAP. In all my years of using Windows and Linux, I never felt compelled to leave open/libreoffice, but Mac users are forced to use a terrible interface.

I think it's time that Libreoffice consider switching to QT - even Ubuntu has QT now installed by default, and QT is infinitely better on Windows and the Mac over gtk.

Still a pile of crap in all of it`s iterations. I`ve tried it several times when it was still OO and now LO and I have it on my Ubuntu boot up and it`s still inferior in every way possible except for price. Sure it`s functional, if your too cheap to get a real office suite, but the only people who are trumpeting it are the usual MS haters. It`s still an MS Office world whether you haters like it or not.

Thanks to Michael Meeks for this port and Alex Larsson for the gtk backend (Broadway).I'm concerned about the use of pngs here. I'd rather see a streaming format used, but using png does mean it's usable with any browser (that I know of). Of course, I'm assuming complete adoption of web sockets (FF added them back in with 7, IIRC, and the others, excluding IE, have had them).I thought OO/LO had moved to Cairo for rendering? I ask b/c those contour lines were terribly anti-aliased...then again that could be a png artifact. Hopefully that doesn't affect fonts too much b/c they didn't look bad in this case.

Still a pile of crap in all of it`s iterations. I`ve tried it several times when it was still OO and now LO and I have it on my Ubuntu boot up and it`s still inferior in every way possible except for price. Sure it`s functional, if your too cheap to get a real office suite, but the only people who are trumpeting it are the usual MS haters. It`s still an MS Office world whether you haters like it or not.

Absolutely, but most of the people who use office only use a small set of features and their work can easily be done in LibreOffice without much of a problem. Take the students for example, what exactly do they need to do that absolutely requires Word? All the text processing needs of a student are perfectly covered by LO.

MS Office is undoubtedly the best suite out there, but in order to even access the features that make it the best places you in the top small percentage of Office users. The other thing would be UI preferences. I happen to love the Ribbon UI. Whether that's worthy of paying the cost is up to the user (although government money is a different deal). I do think a Ribbon interface for LO would be awesome if done correctly. There was some work on one a while ago in OO, does anyone know what happen with that?

Still a pile of crap in all of it`s iterations. I`ve tried it several times when it was still OO and now LO and I have it on my Ubuntu boot up and it`s still inferior in every way possible except for price. Sure it`s functional, if your too cheap to get a real office suite, but the only people who are trumpeting it are the usual MS haters. It`s still an MS Office world whether you haters like it or not.

MS Office is a substandard publishing suite. You still need a professional suite, like what Adobe provides, to really do anything that looks professional.

There are also some things that OO does well that MSO doesn't. I haven't used MSO since 2005/6. I don't miss it. Maybe the newer versions are better than 2003, but I'm not going to pay hundreds of dollars to find out it's still junk. You still need professional programs like InDesign, Photoshop, Flash, to name a few of their programs, in order to make something look really professional.

Your MS world is getting smaller every year.

As to LibreOffice, the website is pretty substandard. It will not install alongside OO, which is the biggest problem with it imo. Look at the horrible looking website they have for LibreOffice: http://www.libreoffice.org/download

I've been using OO for quite a while now and switched to LO. I teach at a University and all my proposals, course material and admin documents are done in LO. Don't miss MS Office one bit (except powerpoint). In fact I tend to miss LO functionality on MS Office (when I have to edit someone else's document and need to preserve formatting exactly). My office desktop is Linux/KDE and use windows at home. So, LO + Dropbox allows me to work on any machine at home, my little laptop that I use for classes, my wife's laptop when I need more real estate etc. I also use Calc for handling all the grades for my classes and it is perfectly fine.

I'm really happy to hear that it is coming to Android as I've been thinking about a tablet to replace my ageing laptop. the only part I'm not happy is Impress. It is slow and inconsistent. At the beginning of the term I really gave it a big push by converting all my ppt to impress, but, editing them is a real pain and it doesn't support e-ink on a tablet (the old MS kind with pen). So, I went back to powerpoint. All my kids use it at home (as I don't have MS office on their computers)

Still a pile of crap in all of it`s iterations. I`ve tried it several times when it was still OO and now LO and I have it on my Ubuntu boot up and it`s still inferior in every way possible except for price. Sure it`s functional, if your too cheap to get a real office suite, but the only people who are trumpeting it are the usual MS haters. It`s still an MS Office world whether you haters like it or not.

MS Office is a substandard publishing suite. You still need a professional suite, like what Adobe provides, to really do anything that looks professional.

There are also some things that OO does well that MSO doesn't. I haven't used MSO since 2005/6. I don't miss it. Maybe the newer versions are better than 2003, but I'm not going to pay hundreds of dollars to find out it's still junk. You still need professional programs like InDesign, Photoshop, Flash, to name a few of their programs, in order to make something look really professional.

Your MS world is getting smaller every year.

As to LibreOffice, the website is pretty substandard. It will not install alongside OO, which is the biggest problem with it imo. Look at the horrible looking website they have for LibreOffice: http://www.libreoffice.org/download

The Republican Party officially condemns this socialist, French 'LibreOffice' and will now only refer to it as 'Freedom Office'. Additionally, only Microsoft Office will be approved for writing memos in Congress, because Microsoft Office produces jobs and profits for millionaires and 'Freedom Office' is a jobs-killing socialist project that undermines the unfettered freedom of the rich to create jobs for pool boys and bodyguards and Lamborghini salesmen. Liberals want you to use this 'Freedom Office' so that they can give government money to homeless crackheads that are shooting up our schools and shoplifting from selfless small business Christian saints. Vote Perry/Cain 2012!

This is great, but my biggest issue is that it's still not 100% compatible with MS Office. The more complex documents in LO or Word, for example, do not display properly in the other -- using TOC, in-document-links, and a number of bullet formats cause issues. (Personally, I wish everyone would dump MS Office, but it's not going to happen.)

MS Office is a substandard publishing suite. You still need a professional suite, like what Adobe provides, to really do anything that looks professional.

Unless you're referring directly to the abomination that is Publisher (thankfully not on the Mac), I doubt most serious "publishers" would even think of using MS Office for high-end graphic design.

Word was never designed to be a publishing app. Where it rocks is in collaborative editorial environments. I am a designer in interactive and print media, and use it myself when working directly with editors--pre design.

Excel is also a beast--in its intrinsic areas. I wouldn't use it to build visually compelling charts and tables. That is where ID and AI come in...

Not sure why so many are bashing LO on the mac. I mainly use it for spreadsheets, not word processing, but for that I find it far preferable to Office. And I think the recent LO versions are quite a bit better on macs than OpenOffice was. Having a good port to Android sounds difficult, but possible.